Dr Bunsen Honeydew and his ginger-haired assistant, Beaker, have been voted "Top Boffin" in a BBC poll run to mark the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA)'s Festival of Science which runs this week in Exeter.

Ericsson, the inventor of Bluetooth, has ended years of aggressively positioning the short range standard for dominance and has stopped developing new products. This is a sign that the market has become one for volume suppliers, not innovators, but it highlights a broader sense that, while the current generation of Bluetooth will achieve a large base, the next generation will be pushed into niches by emerging alternatives —if they can avoid Bluetooth’s many mistakes.

O2 has dismissed allegations that its billing system is up the creek and that it is overcharging customers of its mobile phone service. The claims have been made by mobile reseller OpenAir, which is locked in a legal dispute with the giant mobile operator over the cessation of a contract between the two companies.

The UK government will spend £1.2m between now and 2006 to encourage science to engage with the public, the minister for science and innovation Lord Sainsbury announced today. "Sciencewise" grants will fund projects "to facilitate dialogue between scientists and the public" on new technologies which may have "new ethical, safety, wealth and environmental complications".

Scientists from Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire and the University of Southampton have identified plutonium from 1950s US nuclear tests in British soil, the BBC reports. The team has also pinpointed fallout from Bikini Atoll and Chernobyl.

AIM-listed Iomart Group plc has gobbled up web host outfit Easyspace Ltd for £10.5m. It's the third web host buy-out carried out by Iomart over the last year or so. In 2003 it acquired Internetters and NicNames as it sought to build on its own web business.

Cisco will reward resellers for investment they make in pre-sales especially to small and medium businesses. The Opportunity Incentive Program gives financial incentives to dealers securing sales in the commercial market - including medium enterprises, mid-market and small & medium businesses.

A London outfit responsible for collecting parking fines for offences around the UK has pulled off the most audicious try-on of recent times - demanding a £90 penalty from a Swedish sewage engineer for illegally resting his snowmobile in the centre of Warwick in June.

The UK has become a nation of computer buffs, according to the British Computer Society (BCS). Its survey of 2,180 adults found that three quarters of grown-ups can use a PC to acess the net, while two-thirds have gone online to shop.

Almost three years ago the naval systems arm of major UK defence contractor BAE Systems took the decision to standardise future development on Microsoft Windows. an immediate effect was to commit BAE's joint venture CMS subsidiary, AMS, who specialise in naval Combat Management Systems, to implementing a Windows 2000-based CMS system for the new Type 45 Destroyer. But this prompted strong internal opposition from some of AMS' engineers, who had a sound background in Unix and who had, despite resource starvation and a companywide policy to standardise on Windows, been investigating open source alternatives as a foundation for future combat systems.

The lack of a fully-documented information security policy in halfo of the FTSE 350 companies interviewed by LogicaCMG is worrying for investors, who regard security breaches as one of the main factors that would impact their assessment of a company.